New York’s Changing Foodscapes

Over the past few years, New Yorkers have been pushing their grocery carts through changing foodscapes. Supermarket chains and independent franchises have gone bankrupt; the number of Korean groceries has dwindled. A combination of high-priced specialty stores, big-box retailers, online grocers, and Duane Reades have moved in to fill the empty shelf space.

The old foodscape of New York, sustained by bodegas, corner stores, and independent supermarkets, can still be found in our archive and to read about these establishments gives one a sense not only of how dramatically the grocery business has changed in New York, but also how the city itself has.

In 1972, Susan Sheehan wrote a lengthy Talk of the Town story about a Spanish-American grocery story on Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side. The owner, Juan Cruz, was a former cane-cutter who came to the U.S. from Puerto Rico in 1954.

It bears little resemblance to a supermarket: no air-conditioning, no Muzak, no giant economy sizes, no specials, no impersonal checkout service, no chrome-and-vinyl-décor…. Only three of the infinite variety of Campbell’s soups are stocked—chicken noodle, chicken with rice, and vegetable—because only those sell well. There are Sabbath candles on the bodega’s shelves for the Jews in the neighborhood who have not yet moved away, and there are Progresso canned tomatoes and a profusion of macaronis and spaghettis for the Italians who come from nearby Little Italy to shop (in an earlier incarnation, the bodega was an Italian drogheria).

A couple of years later, Calvin Trillin wrote a U.S. Journal piece about the corner grocery story—which his family called “the Bubble Gum Store,” in his Greenwich Village neighborhood. The store was run by two local residents, Ken and Eve, who had been introduced to each other by the president of their block association. Trillin described how untraditional the owners’ approach to their business was:

For an American who finds himself running a small grocery store these days, the normal channels for ambition are expansion or escape. “A whole bunch of things pressure you to become bigger,” Ken says. “The nature of business in America is to grow.” … Ken and Eve had a different sort of ambition. They did want to make a profit, of course, and Ken says they have greatly improved on the volume of the previous owner. But they are horrified at anything they believe might detract from the intimacy of their store, and they have no interest in the chain-grocery business. When they talk about how the store is doing, they discuss not just sales volume, but whether the atmosphere is quite right or how well the store is filling its role as a place where neighbors can have a relaxed and impromptu chat.

A larger store in Jackson Heights, Queens—an independent supermarket called the Sunshine Market—was the subject of a 1992 Local Correspondents article by Susan Orlean. It doesn’t matter how modern a supermarket is, Orlean wrote, because

On some level, the grocery business is just a clumsy, bulky, primitive enterprise that involves a great deal of stuff—stuff that weighs a lot and takes up a lot of room, and has to be picked up and moved around a lot, and put in boxes and taken out of boxes and put on shelves and then put in bags, just so someone can take it home and eat it. A manager of a grocery store once said to me that his store was like a house that was constantly being torn down by outsiders, and his job was to rebuild it in the face of these hostile destroyers.

Nevertheless, Orlean’s article is as much a portrait of the community around the store as it is of the Sunshine Market itself. In that regard, the market was spiritually akin to the smaller stores described by Sheehan and Trillin a generation earlier:

Most of the thirty-one thousand grocery stores in this country are part of chains. Sunshine is an anachronism—a single-location independently-owned and operated grocery store. When [owner Herb Spitzer] started in the business, more stores were independently owned. “I’m from a past generation,” he says. “Nowadays I have less in common with the guy who runs the chain supermarket, whose ordering and decisions are made for him at some central office, than I do with the little fellow who runs his own bodega.

_The articles—and the complete archives of The New Yorker, back to 1925—is available to subscribers. Non-subscribers can purchase theindividual issues.